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Julie Holm's Blog
Thoughts as I figure out what to say now that I've finished my final paper on bonhoeffer.
The end of the study
Posted by:
Juliana Holm on
August 1, 2010 at
4:17PM EST
The class ended, my last paper is in, and graded, and back, and for the next three weeks I get to sit back, relax, and not worry too much about anything. Then in three weeks, I pack up my full time IBM consultant suitcase one last time (I will continue part time, as much for the opportunity to continue on their health care plan as anything else) and head back to school, to fieldwork.
But I want to take a minute to look back at some of the experience of Bonhoeffer. Outside of the study, what was the experience of this independent/directed study like?
Personal connection - I definitely felt some personal connections with B. This isn't unusual, I often feel a personal connection with someone I am trying very hard to understand, and I was trying very hard to understand him. But there were also some very unique connections. I remember first visiting the Harz mountains in 2002 or 3, in Goslar with my friend Klaus. I thought they reminded me so much of the Appalachian mountains, especially in Pennsylvania (the main place I've encontered them in winter, as I did in Goslar that November.) Bonhoeffer, in one of his letters as he was traveling through the Appalachians on his way to Mexico writes, "For two days we drove through a mountain range that repeatedly made me think of the Harz Mountains." (Works, Vol 10, pg. 300)
Another point of connection was attending church in Ettal on our vacation in July. The monastery had evening prayer at 6 PM and a mass at 6 AM, and I went to both - the evening prayer was in Latin, with lot of chanting of the psalms. I sat there and listened to the monks chant the psalms, and the Magnificat, which I have sung enough to be able to understand in Latin. I realized that this timeless community worship would have no doubt have been attended by Bonhoeffer. The next morning at mass I speculated as to whether the Abbott of his time, also deeply involved in resistance, but on the Roman Catholic side, would have invited B to the communion table.
I did not feel the same connection at Flossenürg, where B died, despite the extensive exhibit with many photographs of B and the people around him. This, I think, is because the story of Flossenbürg, which is very compelling, and which really took over my visit there, really overwhelms the few hours that Bonhoeffer spent there. Studying Bonhoeffer really is a lesson in how our times affect how we believe. You really can trace his thought from his times - from the intellectual heritage of his family and the teachers he happened to encounter in Tubingen and Berlin, to the exposure to the rest of the world in Barcelona, New York, and London, through the experienced of the rise of National Socialism. I spent a lot of time in my final paper specifically tracing the effect of the experience of the African American community in the US as an influence. While surely these influences could easily have combined to result in very different beliefs and understandings, they are nonetheless in retrospect pretty clear. It's fascinating stuff, and I want to spend more time with it.
And finally, studying Bonhoeffer gave me incredible respect for the quiet courage of this outstanding but humble man. No, he was not perfect. He was not always there doing what he should (the refusal, relatively early in his professional career, to assist at the funeral of his brother-in-laws Jewish father was the clearest example of this). But he was one of the most courageous people I've ever read about, and ever read the writings of, and I am very, very glad to have made his acquaintance. I'm not done with Bonhoeffer - I'll return to him during the coming year, and i suspect that he'll make it into sermons more than once as I move into ministry.
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